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Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

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Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#501
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your TOS matters insofar as you can prove a person actually read and agreed to it. These are illegal in different ways: 1. Copyright violations (can put you in jail) 2. TOS violations (will be a fine at worst) Companies do get away with drive-by legal shittiness way too often and frankly the practice needs to be reined in, but at the end of the day the only damages are the financial ones you can prove in court.

And what if the LLM ingested and “understood” it as part of its training?

Well, I guess that's a personal question but the law is pretty clear that only a human being can "understand" anything.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#502
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if the LLM ingested and “understood” it as part of its training?

Well, I guess that's a personal question but the law is pretty clear that only a human being can "understand" anything.

How convenient.

Incidentally, this suggests that once an LLM is capable of accessing and distilling a competitor's LLM without human intervention, then any legal argument about TOS violation is moot. But somehow I doubt that will fly in court.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine any agency in their right mind training an LLM on their top secret data… especially considering that essentially it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac. So you would end up in a situation where people who need to know who killed A, also know who killed B, not to mention cell A knowing potentia…

> it would collapse all need to know data in one easily leakable single access domain. The models have no feasible or reasonable way to implement rbac Oh my sweet summer child... This has been the continual goal of the US defense and intelligence agencies since 9/11, which was blamed on a lack of information sharing. Why do you think Edward Snowden had access to everything? Because it was consolidated post-2001. You…

Snowden had mass access to a mass surveillance program, not mass access to N dark programs or particular bits of high value intelligence. The thing you are describing is primarily around sharing threat intelligence or in other words, spying on us plebes. High value target intelligence and other bits of fun are still kept quite seperate.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your link doesn't suggest a violation of TOS, but rather a policy shift disallowing their major competitors to use their model for any use. That thread you linked suggested they were using it with cursor as part of their development process, not for distilling. >"Hi team, I believe many of you have already discovered that anthropic models are not responding on cursor. According to cursor this is a new policy anthropi…

Cursor might have framed it that way at the time, but 4 months prior Anthropic cut OpenAIs access under the same clause in the ToS: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-revokes-openais-access... And a month before the OpenAI block, they blocked Windsurf for the same reason: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2025/06/05/anthropi... So its pretty clear the TOS had this clause prior to Jan 2026.

Again neither of those links indicated usage that violate TOS beyond being a major competitor.

They indiacte their development staff are using it, and they access it via API, then then go on to say all the nefarious things they "could" be doing, stopping before stating they actually are.

Specifically the TOS violation was:

>customers are barred from using the service to “build a competing product or service"

So if you are building a competitive product, that alone is a TOS violation from their perspective.

Which is fine and their prerogative, but we shouldn't cast a dark cloud suggesting other violations were happening without stated evidence.

OpenAI publicly stated they can't "trust that xAI will use it within terms" not even that they've violated, not that there has been a violation from the Cursor team.

https://www.teslarati.com/openai-cites-distrust-of-spacex-in...

>OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service"

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the things you need to do if you want your company to later become the only company in the world. They also promised that they would treat you nicely afterwards after they get what they want.

> become the only company in the world This is not a necessary end state. It is the byproduct of the disease of sociopathic MBAs.

> sociopathic MBAs

For the record, with the exception of Amazon’s Jassy, the CEOs of the top 5 companies are all engineering types with engineering credentials.

The CEO credentials of the top 5 AI companies are all science degrees.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#506
post #77

Bummed, but I guess for me, doesn't mean cursor subscription ending though. Grok is a pretty amazing model for the speed and price on Cursor.

Does Grok have a subscription that competes with Claude Max $100 plan (genuinely curious)

It's a little confusing because Grok and Cursor kinda live in different worlds. Grok has SuperGrok and SuperGrok Heavy ($300 a month!)

The best bet is Cursor Ultra ($200), which is the equivalent a month plan that you get from OpenAI and Anthropic. I get a LOT more capacity out of it because I almost always use the "Auto" mode, which auto picks between Opus 5, GPT 5.6, Grok 4.6, and Composer 2.5.

I like Auto mode so much actually. I use it for my Cursor work account as well because it's about 10x faster than just using Opus 5 or GPT 5.6 and about 90% is good. I switch back to the bigger models if I get in trouble, but that's pretty rare.

Vibe coding requires some discipline. You need understand what it's trying to do. If you have a good mental model you can keep it out of trouble. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good the model is. You're gonna end up in a mess.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#507

This seems like a no brainer, not sure how Cursor would expect to be trusted by any other company now that they’re owned by SpaceX.

I really get sick of this anti-Elon rhetoric around here. Can we not keep it to technical merits and not get sucked up into politics? The guy's clearly nuts, but he's also done an incredible amount of amazing things.

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#508
post #24

Honestly, can't say I miss my Cursor subscription at all, and I'm surprised they're still a going concern. Why would I want to use a proprietary VSCode fork with an identity crisis when I can use literally any editor with any agent and have about the same experience?

Cursor Cloud Agents are pretty great, as is Grok Bot which comes with the sub

Re: Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

#510
post #17

Not surprised, but honestly I don't feel like this is a huge loss for cursor. Models are so commoditized, and 99% of users don't need particularly fancy models. Between existing anthropic models, composer-2, honestly even grok models, and also the fact that many people just use 'auto' mode, I feel like many won't feel the impact for OpenAI's withdrawal. Maybe if Claude joined along it would be more impactful. For bet…

Agree, I use Auto 90% of the time. I doubt I'll tell the difference.
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